What’s it worth?

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

If burglars ever broke into my house looking for valuables, they would leave very disappointed. We own very little that has what most would consider high-end merchandise. We have a big TV and a couple of two-year-old laptops… and that’s about it. Maybe a couple of my daughter’s guitars would net about 50 bucks each at a pawnshop, but the most expensive thing in our house is probably my wife’s dog’s $3,000 surgically repaired back leg (that still doesn’t work quite right).

Having said that, our house is actually pretty full of treasures, although they would have little value to anyone else. We, like many folks, have irreplacable family photos and keepsakes and that sort of thing. My comic book collection doesn’t include Batman #1 or anything like that, but I cherish them like I do my 1991 Atlanta Braves baseball card team set or my Friday the 13th Jason Voorhees hockey mask. My wife has her books, my daughter has every stuffed animal she’s ever owned and the drawer full of memorabilia from her days playing softball, volleyball, band and whatnot. Nothing anyone wants, but stuff that you can’t really put a price tag on when it comes to it’s true value to us. I recently got

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into following a Reddit group called r/whatisthisworth, where people post pictures of stuff they have found or inherited or otherwised come into possession of and they ask the Reddit community to identify and/pr assess the value of their finds.

It is often something like an autographed baseball or a commemorative Ronald Reagan inauguration coffee cup or a Confederate $10 bill or something. I think most of the time they are just bragging, for whatever reason, to the online community about something they own or are hoping that the old “War Is Over” newspaper from 1945 that Grandma’s dishes they found up in the attic were wrapped in is going to be their retirement nest egg.

Spoiler: It is not.

While there certainly are valuable things out there you can collect, like coins and art and stamps and vintage items, most of what we fill our homes with isn’t really about the value. You can put a price tag on anything these days (I weep at thinking about the old records and Star Wars toys and video games I used to have back in the day) but I don’t know that you really get the happiness of owning those things if it’s just about the money. I bought all of those comic books to read the adventures of my favorite heroes not stick them in a plastic bag and put them under the bed.

My Star Wars dudes and G.I.

Joe guys went to war back in the 1980s and they look like it with their missing parts and battle scars.

I what a one-legged ‘77 Darth Vader is worth these days?